Dominic Blakemore
Group CEO & Director

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Welcome to our half year results. We've delivered another very strong half with operating profit up by 12%. This performance reflects a powerful combination of good organic growth, continued margin expansion and disciplined M&A. As a result, we're raising our guidance for the full year and now expect operating profit growth above 11%.

The outsourcing market remains highly attractive, and our new business wins were excellent, increasing by 14% year-on-year to $4.1 billion. Over half of our wins came from first-time outsourcing, reflecting the strong structural growth opportunity across our markets, driven by the increasing complexity of client demands.

Combined with our strong client retention, we have high confidence in our outlook for net new business growth, which we expect to accelerate in the second half. We continue to execute against our proven growth algorithm as we generate strong long-term recurring revenues.

We're delivering mid- to high single-digit organic revenue growth. When you layer on ongoing margin progression and M&A, that continues to translate into high single-digit operating profit growth. And this year, profit growth will be even stronger, reflecting the contribution from Vermaat.